Optimizing Throughput

How Can RTLS Help Your ED Run at Peak Performance?

We know today’s ED can be faced with so many diverse challenges. Whether it’s accelerating and optimizing patient flow and throughput, improving and optimizing staff workflow and productivity, maximizing and optimizing resource and spatial capacity, or improving overall patient and financial outcomes, these challenges can impact staff morale, patient satisfaction and the bottom line. As a result, facilities need solutions that deliver efficiencies and help contain growth in medical cost while still delivering consistent high-quality care. Your facility could be facing one or more of these challenges, and we have the solution – RTLS.

Real Time Location Systems (RTLS) have been a valuable, emerging technology in healthcare for several years now. Traditionally RTLS has been leveraged for asset and equipment tracking and management – but consider the value it could deliver to optimizing throughput.

Imagine The Possibilities

Imagine if your ED could minimize crucial minutes wasted looking for other members of staff, patients, or equipment? Or if your facility could analyze when and where delays occur, and distinguish between delays that are a frequent or a rare occurrence? Imagine if all this data could be accessed by other departments so that inter-department communication and collaboration could be seamlessly accelerated? Or if your facility’s ED could evaluate and monitor in real time the effectiveness of proposed and implemented changes and performance initiatives?

With Sonitor® Sense ™ RTLS, there is no need to ‘imagine’—it’s possible. Real Time Location Systems are providing hospitals and medical facilities with the ability to avoid wasting money on one-off problems and deploy resources (such as additional staff) more appropriately. By tagging mobile medical equipment (beds, wheel chairs, IV pumps, etc.) and providing patients and staff with RTLS badges, your emergency medical staff will have instant, real time access to accurate, bed or bay-level location information, and an overview of workflow efficiency to best optimize throughput.

As a result, facilities can easily draw from the detailed data real time locating systems gather to help inform meaningful, long-term changes to the facility layout, patient flow, and overall workflow performance. ED’s can proactively manage staff scheduling and equipment locations. RTLS can even gauge whether delays within the ED are anomalies or consistent inefficiencies; and being able to distinguish between what is common and what is not is imperative to avoid wasting money and critical patient face-time, thus allowing staff to work proactively rather than playing catch-up.

RTLS can help EDs monitor the effectiveness of a facility’s implemented changes. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) states that, “project-specific data collected during the Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) process to test small-scale process improvements … is one of the most effective levers for achieving and sustaining process improvements.” To distinguish between which initiatives are proving to be successful and which are consuming staff time and energy can help executives make the right decisions regarding ED operations and ultimately deliver improved staff morale, higher patient satisfaction and an increase to the bottom line.